


Failure

by Asynca



Series: Ready, Set, Go! - Speed Prompts [31]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-30 17:36:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11468394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asynca/pseuds/Asynca
Summary: 'Failure' means something different when you are a doctor.Speed prompt, written in 32 minutes.





	Failure

The first patient she lost was a little girl.

Angela was just a student in her third year of medicine, and the hospital was overrun because of local rioting. That meant all hands on deck—students or not. The _real_ doctors, the qualified ones, were so swarmed that Angela couldn’t get a word in, and the girl's mother—a child herself, really, barely older than Angela—pushed the tiny girl into Angela's arms.  

“Please help her,” she said—Angela couldn’t hear her over the racket, but she knew what the mother was saying. “Please help my little girl!”

The girl looked up at Angela with her big brown eyes, a mixture of fear and trust in them. What else could she do? “At once,” she told the mother.

As Angela wrangled a trolley from the hallway, she saw the mother almost crying with relief, turning her face skyward and thanking God. She smiled at Angela as Angela lay the girl on the trolley.

At first examination of the girl, she was just pale and quiet. Her eyes rolled a little in her head and she was gasping for breath, but her presentation was not remarkable. When Angela took off her clothes, it was a different story. Her torso was full and mottled, one side of her rib cage sank and moved oddly as she tried to breathe.

Angela’s own stomach sank. This girl was _very_ ill. She’d been completely crushed by the crowd.

Moving quickly, she found a spare bottle of oxygen and gave her a mask; there were no IV bags or blood in Supply so she went to try and grab the nurse on duty. The nurse was surrounded by patients, patients' families and policemen who needed her to sign their paperwork. She also had a phone propped between her shoulder and ear, and the console was flashing like a nightclub.

Angela waited for a few minutes, fidgeting, pacing, worrying—until she _had_ to butt in. “Excuse me,” she said, pushing her way forward. “Excuse me, but my patient urgently needs type-O blood!”

The nurse looked at her with cold, tired eyes. “Get in line,” she said. Not cruelly, the verbal punch felt the same as if he had been.  

“But she’s just a little girl, she has internal bleeding and—”

Someone pushed a clipboard at her—another doctor. “Here’s the list,” he said. “When the blood arrives, we’ll save some units for you.”

When it arrives? But—“She won’t last until the next delivery of—”

The doctor put a warm hand on her shoulder. “In times like this,” he said, again, not cruelly, “we need to focus our energy on the people who _will_ last.”

Then, everyone turned away from her. She was there, standing still in the midst of a crowd of people running, family crying, patients screaming. Just as if she were invisible.

Just like that little girl. She closed her mouth, jaw set. Well, that little girl had no one else. And maybe Angela was just a medical student, and maybe all she had was oxygen—but she could lengthen that little girl’s life. Surely the delivery of emergency blood would come soon?

She tried to call surgery—internal bleeding needing surgery—but the phone was just engaged. She eventually left a voicemail.

Back at the bedside, the mother was holding the little girl’s hand and stroking her forehead. The girl was drifting in and out of consciousness—the mother looked calmer. “If she’s sleepy, that means her pain is getting better, doesn’t it?”

Angela felt sick. Sick to her stomach. Putting her fingers against the girl’s neck, the girl’s pulse was hardly palpable. It wouldn’t be long before she slipped into VFib.

It wasn’t, it was less than a minute. The girl went limp, her limbs moving in one stiff spasm. The mother cried out, and Angela crawled onto the bed, pushing the covers aside and getting ready for CPR. She pressed her code buzzer; it did nothing. The code was already flashing for so many other patients in so many parts of the hospital. She started CPR; in between compressions on this tiny girl’s half-crushed chest she yelled; she yelled, shouted, _begged_ until she was _hoarse_ for a crash-cart with defibrillators. They were already in use, and the ER was so crowded no one could hear her.

She worked on that girl for half an hour, until her arms shook with the strain and she was out of breath. Until her back ached and her muscles cramped and her eyes were red. _The blood will be delivered soon_ , she promised herself. _It will come soon_!

But it didn’t. And after half an hour, when the girl’s ribs were all broken and bruised and Angela’s legs shook, she sat back. Silent, amongst all the screaming and crying in the ER.

The girl was dead. She felt her lips read the time of death, numb. 

The mother had been weeping; but now, she had no tears left. Shaking even harder than Angela was, she took the broken body of her little girl into her arms and sang to her—a lullaby Angela could hardly hear over the noise.

Angela could barely look at the woman. All she could think of was that _trust_ in that had once been in that little girl’s eyes; eyes that were now empty, staring upwards towards the sky.

She was the first patient Angela lost. The first notch on her stethoscope; the first sleepless night spent sobbing into her pillow. She was Angela’s first failure—and sometimes, she can still hear that mother’s last, haunting lullaby to her dead little girl.


End file.
